End of an Era: 390TB Game Preservation Library Myrient Announces March 31 Shutdown
The digital preservation community is mourning a significant loss. Myrient, one of the world’s largest public archives of video game software, has announced it will shut down on March 31, 2026. The site, which hosted over 390 terabytes of meticulously organized game collections, will cease operations at the end of the month.
In a post on its official Telegram channel, Myrient’s operator explained that a combination of financial pressure, user abuse, and surging hardware costs has made continued operation unsustainable. Unlike many sites that have been taken offline due to copyright enforcement, this closure is driven by pure economics.
Three Reasons for the Closure
The operator cited three primary factors behind the decision. First, donations have failed to keep pace with growing traffic and expenses. Despite increasing usage throughout 2025, the amount received through donations remained flat, leaving the site’s founder to cover more than $6,000 per month out of pocket just to keep the servers running.
Second, the site has been targeted by commercial entities using specialized “paywalled download managers.” These tools bypassed Myrient’s download protections and donation prompts, with some even locking features behind paywalls for paying users. The operator stated that using Myrient “for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden,” calling such abuse “egregious and unacceptable”.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, the global memory shortage has driven hardware costs through the roof. “Since last September, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically and continue to rise due to the ongoing extreme demand for AI datacenters,” the operator explained. This has made necessary upgrades to storage and caching infrastructure prohibitively expensive.
What Myrient Preserved
Myrient was far more than a simple ROM site. Its collections represented a comprehensive effort to catalog and preserve video game history. The archive included No-Intro sets covering cartridge-based games, Redump collections for optical media, arcade sets like MAME and FinalBurn Neo, TOSEC and TOSEC-ISO archives, the Total DOS Collection, and a section labeled “Internet Archive”.
For preservationists, Myrient was considered by many to be the best ROM site available—a centralized, up-to-date repository of curated game data that eliminated the need to scramble across dozens of fragmented websites.
A Month to Download 390 Terabytes
The site will remain accessible in its current state until March 31, giving users approximately one month to download any content they consider important. However, downloading 390 terabytes is no small feat. It requires massive storage capacity and high-speed internet that most individual users simply do not possess.
The Emulation General Wiki has called this “like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, for emulated games instead of books,” warning that some content may become permanently unavailable after the shutdown.
Community Response
The announcement has sparked a flurry of activity across preservation communities. Efforts are underway to back up as much of the archive as possible, with users coordinating via Telegram channels and Signal groups to share torrents and coordinate scraping efforts.
ArchiveTeam, a group dedicated to preserving digital history, has indicated that its Warrior software may be usable for those wishing to contribute to backup efforts.
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A Broader Trend
Myrient’s closure is not an isolated incident. The AI-driven demand for memory and storage has sent hardware prices soaring across the industry, affecting everything from cloud hosting providers to individual consumers. German data center giant Hetzner recently announced price increases of 30-38% on its cloud services, citing rising hardware costs.
For now, Myrient’s Discord server and Telegram channel will remain active, providing a gathering place for the preservation community to continue discussing how to save gaming history. But the loss of 390 terabytes of curated, organized game data represents a significant blow to digital preservation efforts—one that underscores just how fragile our digital heritage can be when it relies on individual passion to sustain it.
Source: myrient